IPv4 addresses are likely to not run out in 2012, according to experts, and instead the new year should be used as a time of transition for all enterprises.

IP Transit: 2012 Expected to Not be the End for IPv4 Addresses

“2012 is a great time to learn and to plan,” said Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture at Infoblox (News - Alert), a company that sells automated network control appliances. “Capitalize on the lead time that you have available to you.”

Some corporations have already taken steps to make the transition to IPv6, but according to Infoblox in Oct., less than 1 percent of all subdomains under the .com, .net and .org top-level domains had IPv6-enabled Web serves on them.

In February, the Internet Assigned Names and Numbers Authority gave out the last of its remaining five blocks of addresses to each of the five regional registries: Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America and Africa; according to an article by reporter Stephen Lawson.

Each block assigned to the five registries held nearly 16 million addresses and by April the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre reportedly depleted all their IPv4 addresses. “Once their stock started to dwindle, a lot of carriers went, ‘Wow, we’d better get what address space we can, quickly,” Liu said.

As reported by PC Mag in April, “The region officially moved into its planned ‘Phase Three’ of the transition, where new and existing members will have restricted access to the existing IPv4 addresses used by most PCs today.” The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre then made “IPv6 mandatory for building new Internet networks and services.”

The European market, however, is expected to not make the same mistakes since they are predicted to be the next region to run out of IPv4 addresses. Geoff Houston, an adjunct researcher at the Centre for Advanced Internet Architecture at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, forecasted that July 22 will be the date when Europe sees its IPv4 addresses depleted.

However, according to Liu, “That doesn’t mean that Europeans are suddenly going to be stripped of their existing IPv4 address space,” but instead, “It’s going to be much harder to get IPv4 address space.”

North American is said to be the third region to see the Internet registry run out of IPv4 addresses in 2013. And lastly, Africa and Latin America will be the in same predicament in 2014.

One country that is currently preparing for the inevitable is New Zealand which has created an IPv6 Task Force “to accelerate the adoption of the new IP standard and meet the surging Internet traffic in the country,” according to an article on TMCnet.

Unfortunately this quick adoption is not the same for most enterprises and according to IDC (News - Alert) analyst Nav Chandler, they are “not acting aggressively to upgrade, and most won’t next year either.”

Infoblox Chief Tome Coffeen, suggest to “figure out how to incorporate your IPv6 into your upgrade cycles and your process update cycles” in order to prepare for an easier transition.